What Modi visit really means for Indians living in America
The last time I saw a crowd this happy was probably at a matinee of Hum Aapke Hain Koun - and I'm not saying that just because of the perplexed Midwestern tourist in downtown San Jose who saw a group of Indians walking towards the hotel yesterday and exclaimed, "They must be going to a wedding!"
For the diaspora, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's trips are not just about business and patriotism, as news reports often make them out to be. What you see and feel when you are there in these community events for him is a manifestation of the ultimate joy NRIs know in their lives far from India: the arrival of someone dear to them from home.
We have all been in that moment here, in this work-hard-get-credit American Dream where the material comforts we grew up craving back in India (and all the more so for those of us who were born before liberalisation) somehow all became instantly and easily available, but what we missed most of all was just home, and its people. The international arrivals area of any US airport still shows you what it is that remains important to us; American-born children rushing into their harrowed but happy grandmothers and grandfathers' arms, college friends welcoming their old roommates, waiting faces hoping despite all the stores that sell them widely here that the pickles somehow made it through … lives from here and there reunite every day, happily.
And one day, a prime minister of India walks in too, just like that.
It is not easy for academicians to understand this phenomenon. When I saw the roaring crowd at the amphitheatre with its heavy-metal ads for capitalist India in Madison Square Garden last September, I wondered too if this adulation was nothing more than a manufactured spectacle, not quite Nuremberg as the nuttier and nastier comparisons made it out to be, but still a circus with no meaning beyond that. But the fact is that here the spectacle, the well-organised machinery that churns out events like a Bollywood formula, does not supply the meaning of the man who is at the heart of it. That, he does himself, or, one could say, the people do it through him. It is an inseparable dance of democracy that expresses itself here, in the diaspora, in ways that are peculiar to its lifestyle, but true to its life's spirit, still.
Close to one thousand people were there at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose yesterday to meet the prime minister. It was the quintessential suburban Indian diaspora event; almost a pre-celebration for the volunteers and their families who have been working intensely to put together the much larger stadium event. They were invited in groups of ten on to the stage for a brief photo-op. There was some shoving as people tried to get to the spot beside him, but it only made the audience laugh. In fact the mood, for the whole hour or so that the prime minister was there was one of warmth and levity.
How does one account for the adulation? Some might argue that the attraction might is just about celebrity, the inevitable social one-upmanship of having the invite, the photo, the story to tell next week. But there is also the fact that Modi has awakened hope in people after a very long time too; not just in the bigger parts of the diaspora like America, but in the small diasporic communities in several nations around the world too. If you ask the average person (and contrary to some media myths, these are mostly average persons you see in these events, not snooty plutocratic elites or political dynasts accustomed to privilege) what this hope is about you might hear the usual answers; ending corruption and poverty in India, better roads and facilities, less red-tape with travel and business, and the like. But the truth is that other politicians have promised better governance too, and none of them have been given rock star welcomes in America. The real hope, perhaps, lies in the fact that Modi is selling neither blind economic growth nor a blind sense of identity-pride, but a sense of faith in people's sense of their own worlds and lives again. He is the ultimate visitor from India, because he is bringing the diaspora the assurance that it is cool to be exactly who they are.
Narendra Modi is a phenomenon of the everyday reasserting itself after a long and ugly run for the discourse of big modernity. In his speeches, what he has been doing is to call on people to see the world from within their own moral universes of the familiar, the simple and domestic. His fans probably do not quite know how to articulate this worldview though they feel it for sure, and his critics, such as there are, simply do not even know how to see it. At its core, Modi's vision may be coming from his understanding of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya's integral humanism, and the lineage of works that have preceded it in a similar tradition. But what is happening today is something significant and as yet unseen. It is a hope for civilisation, and not just Indian or Hindu civilisation, but civilisation in the universal sense of decency, to restore itself after 500 years or maybe more of imperial tyranny and grand designs that have crushed the kindness and dignity of everyday life all over the world.
For now, it may be all right too to just think that there's an Indian wedding everyone's going to in California.